Each of these films took a simple but exciting premise—like a cop fighting his way through a skyscraper filled with terrorists or the only man who ever broke out of Alcatraz being forced to break back in—and made magic. These days, the only films being given this kind of treatment are the John Wick series and The Equalizer franchise, while the vast majority are relegated to Friday night programmers who go straight to Prime Video.

Perhaps this is why I always have such a great time watching a ’90s action thriller on a lazy Sunday afternoon, though. Hollywood made so many of these high-concept films in that decade—and they’ve fallen off so much since then—that even the middling ones seem like masterpieces compared to what action fans are offered today. I’ve heard this kind of film dubbed a “five-star, three-star movie”, and that descriptor simply makes my heart sing. It literally couldn’t be more accurate.

Here are ten of the best five-star-three-star movies from the ’90s, each of which is probably better than anything released today. Or maybe they’re not better, and my nostalgia-addled brain is just putting mediocre films from my youth on an unfair pedestal. Either way, it’ll be a fun read.

10 underrated 1990s action thrillers:

Passenger 57 (Kevin Hooks, 1992)

Passenger 57 is maybe the platonic ideal of a five-star-three-star movie. If you watch this cheesy 84-minute Wesley Snipes action thrill ride and are thoroughly entertained yet also fully aware that it’s not very good, then you are someone capable of embracing this kind of movie in the manner that serves it best.

In the film, Snipes plays John Cutter, a widowed former policeman, soldier, and Secret Service agent who is now training flight attendants in self-defence. He winds up boarding the same aeroplane as a British drug kingpin whose cronies attempt to free him mid-flight – but then Cutter says, “Not on my watch”. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, but that’s what he means with every punch, kick, and gunshot.

This film launched Snipes as an action star, and it’s easy to see why—few leading men in Hollywood could match the martial arts skills Snipes displays throughout the movie. Perhaps the standout element, however, is drug lord Charles Rane, portrayed by Bruce Payne.

Payne brings a detached, seemingly polite Englishness to the role, which shifts to chilling, serial killer-esque brutality in an instant.

Executive Decision (Stuart Baird, 1996)

Sticking with the aeroplane theme, Executive Decision is a high-stakes action film starring Kurt Russell as a US Army Intelligence analyst who is unexpectedly thrust into the field. He joins a Special Ops team attempting a daring mid-flight insertion into a hijacked plane. Steven Seagal plays the team leader, but his trademark ponytail and questionable Aikido skills can’t save him when he’s sucked out of the plane barely a third of the way into the movie. From there, it’s up to Russell to step up and save the day, aided by Halle Berry’s resourceful and charismatic flight attendant.

If that description doesn’t make you want to watch Executive Decision, then you and I have different definitions of ‘cinema.’ In all seriousness, though, the movie is an insanely great Saturday afternoon watch, as it’s arguably a cut above some of the other movies on this list. It’s not quite a four-star-five-star movie if such a thing could ever exist, but it’s damn good.

The thing that Executive Decision has going for it – other than Russell being the coolest actor alive, even when he’s playing a nerd – is that its cast is stacked. The supporting roles are filled almost entirely with “Hey, it’s that guy” faces like John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, BD Wong, JT Walsh, and David Suchet. It’s also directed with real verve by Stuart Baird, an English editor and second unit director who only helmed three movies: Executive Decision, US Marshals, and Star Trek: Nemesis. Somewhat unsurprisingly, I like all three.

Ricochet (Russell Mulcahy, 1991)

In the ’90s, Denzel Washington went a little crazy with these kinds of movies, and it had wildly mixed results. When he wasn’t delivering the goods in acclaimed pictures like Malcolm X and Philadelphia, Washington seemed to love nothing more than to sign himself up for a lurid thriller or action movie. There were some good ones, like Devil in a Blue Dress, The Pelican Brief, and The Siege, and some regrettable ones, like Virtuosity and The Bone Collector.

For my money, the pinnacle of Washington’s great, three-star 1990s flicks has to be 1991’s Ricochet—a gloriously unhinged film that could never be made the same way today. Washington stars as an Assistant District Attorney who finds himself locked in a battle of wits with a vengeful hitman he once put behind bars during his days as a cop. The prison escape scene, where the hitman stages a bloody and almost operatic breakout, is as jaw-dropping as it is brutal—made even more surreal by the fact that the villain is played with gleeful, scenery-chewing malevolence by none other than John Lithgow. Yes, that John Lithgow.

To be fair, as hard as it may be for people who only know Lithgow for his kind roles or his hilarious sitcom turn in 3rd Rock From the Sun, he did actually play several villains in this period. After all, he menaced Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger and was legitimately frightening in Raising Cain. He brings a lot of that intensity to Ricochet, and the details of his plan to ruin the life and reputation of Washington’s character will shock most modern audiences. Seriously. It’s messed up.

The River Wild (Curtis Hanson, 1994)

In the ’90s, everyone threw their hat into the action game – even the greatest leading woman in Hollywood history. 1994’s The River Wild was Streep’s sole foray into this territory, and it’s a total blast to watch, even if you occasionally think, “It’s so weird to see Streep in something like this”.

The story follows a family on a white-water rafting holiday who are taken hostage by two armed fugitives. Kevin Bacon plays one of these fugitives, who is extremely menacing. The other is played by John C Reilly, which is another case of, “It’s so weird to see him in something like this” thanks to the comedy successes of his later career. However, all the acting in the movie is top-notch, and director Curtis Hanson – who would be nominated for the ‘Best Director’ Oscar only four years later for LA Confidential – keeps the tension high at all times.

It’s tempting to wonder how different movie history might have been if Streep had embraced roles like this and made more action movies. Could she have been a ’90s version of Charlize Theron, for example? In the end, though, maybe it’s just not what she likes doing. On the other hand, perhaps she didn’t take too kindly to being talked into a scene she didn’t want to do, which led to her nearly drowning, and that rightfully scared her off the genre.

Desperate Measures (Barbet Schroeder, 1998)

Desperate Measures is a 1998 action thriller starring Andy Garcia and Michael Keaton. It sank like a stone at the box office and received dismal reviews, many of which criticised its utterly ludicrous plot. I, for one, disagree with these critics, though, because I firmly believe the fact that said plot is so wildly implausible is the very thing that marks the film out as a true perfect three-star effort.

In this super silly yet super exciting movie, Garcia plays a cop named Frank Conner, whose son is dying of leukaemia and needs a bone marrow donation to live. Thankfully, Conner knows of a compatible donor – but there’s a problem. The donor is Conner’s arch-nemesis, Peter McCabe, a murderous sociopath being held in the maximum security unit of Pelican Bay State Prison. Will Conner break McCabe out to get his son the bone marrow he needs? You bet he will. But will this whole thing go sideways when McCabe escapes at the hospital, and the building is locked down? Can Conner re-capture him so his son can live to see another day?

According to legend, director Barbet Schroeder had nine uncredited writers work on the Desperate Measures script to try and iron out the kinks in David Klass’ original screenplay. That’s right, nine different writers took a crack at this bad boy and created a three-star action thriller for the ages. It’s worth watching alone just to witness a hugely charismatic Keaton performance where he contorts his eyebrows into hitherto unseen villainous combinations.

Soldier (Paul WS Anderson, 1998)

Paul WS Anderson’s Soldier has a lot in common with Anderson’s other movies, including the likes of Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Event Horizon, and Alien vs Predator. Objectively, they’re not very good films, even if they have some aspects to recommend, such as special effects, production design, or action scenes. Here’s the thing with an Anderson movie, though – sometimes they just hit the spot, and they’re so fun to watch and dissect that it doesn’t matter if they’re bad.

Soldier stars that man Kurt Russell again, this time playing a future soldier trained from childhood to be an emotionless killing machine. He is left for dead by the military that trained him and befriends a group of refugees on a distant moon in the year 2036 before finding a chance for redemption when the new and improved unit that has replaced soldiers like him arrives to try and wipe out the refugees.

Russell somehow manages to give Soldier a beating heart despite playing a mostly vacant killing machine that only utters 104 words in the film. The film is visually impressive, especially because so much of what is on screen is practically created, unlike the CGI-fest it would likely become if it were made today. It’s also fun to consider the movie as an unofficial spiritual sequel to Blade Runner, as writer David Webb Peoples claimed it to be in ’98.

Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996)

The year before John Woo hit paydirt with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off, he had a Travolta trial run with Broken Arrow. The movie is about two Air Force pilots locked in a battle of wits – another one of those – when one of them steals a stealth bomber with two nuclear warheads attached. He plans to blackmail the US government with the threat of a nuclear holocaust, but not if his betrayed colleague has anything to say about it.

Broken Arrow is nowhere near as great as Face/Off, but it’s very entertaining in its own right. Travolta gets to cut loose as the villain, as he would also get to do to great effect at the start of Face/Off, and Christian Slater does his best with a fairly milquetoast hero role. The action sequences are stunning, as you’d expect from someone like Woo, and the score by Hans Zimmer is one of his best ’90s efforts.

Amusingly, Zimmer’s score was so memorable that the track ‘Rope-A-Dope’ wound up being reused in other movies, including Speed 2: Cruise Control and Scream 2. In Wes Craven’s horror sequel, it’s reframed as the love theme for David Arquette and Courteney Cox’s characters, which is a bit of a head-scratcher, considering it also works so well in this pulse-pounding military action movie. Weird.

Kiss of Death (Barbet Schroeder, 1995)

Before Barbet Schroeder made Desperate Measures, he made another top-drawer three-star movie featuring one of Nicolas Cage’s most off-the-wall performances. A remake of the 1947 noir that is so loose in its connection to the original that I struggle to classify it as such, Kiss of Death plays like three movies in one—and each one is crammed into a scant 101 minutes.

In addition to Cage, the cast of this lurid, violent crime movie is bonkers. You’ve got Samuel L Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ving Rhames, Stanley Tucci, Philip Baker Hall, and Hope Davis, and the whole thing is anchored by a pre-CSI: Miami David Caruso. They all do what they can with the material, although it’s easy to see why Caruso didn’t cement his spot as a leading man in the movies. In fact, he was nominated for a Razzie for his performance, but that’s probably a bit harsh.

The main problem for Caruso and everyone else in the picture is that they’re all acting in a different movie than Cage – but his movie is by far the most fun to watch. As a juiced-up gangster named ‘Little Junior’ Brown, who is always wearing a white vest, pumping iron, and generally being a madman, Cage is a riot. At one point, he begins a scene by bench-pressing a stripper, which makes it pretty hard to pay attention to much else happening, but it is undeniably hilarious.

Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995)

In 1995, New York artist Robert Longo’s directorial debut Johnny Mnemonic was released. The cyberpunk sci-fi action thriller starred Keanu Reeves as a data courier in a future dominated by mega-corporations. He has a data implant in his brain that houses confidential information that a powerful Yakuza Lord wants suppressed, so he hires an assassin – played by Ivan Drago himself, Dolph Lundgren – to kill him. If any of this sounds nuts, that’s because it is. However, Johnny Mnemonic also has a unique vision of the future based on a William Gibson short story, so it can’t be all bad.

At the time, Johnny Mnemonic – a spellcheck nightmare, if ever there was one – flopped at the box office and was written off by critics. However, it has been reevaluated over the years, especially in light of Reeves’ success with The Matrix. The Wachowskis were heavily influenced by Gibson’s work on their seminal classic, and in some ways, it makes Mnemonic play like a prototype for a style that would be perfected in The Matrix.

Unfortunately for Longo, his foray into filmmaking was unhappy because he claimed the studio took the film away from him and recut it. He claimed he was trying to make an ironic statement about capitalism through the prism of sci-fi, but the studio reshaped it into a more mainstream action thriller – and he’s never directed another film since. In fact, he once said, “Making a painting is one thing, but making a film kicks your ass”.

Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998)

In the mid-90s, Denzel Washington somehow conspired not to recognise the brilliance in Andrew Kevin Walker’s script for Seven and turned down the opportunity to play the role that ultimately went to Brad Pitt. It’s long been believed that this decision haunted Washington to some degree—because why else would he then sign up for something like Fallen only a few years later?

Fallen is a serial killer action thriller with a twist – the killer is a fallen angel named Azazel who can possess human beings simply by touching them. This means he can hop from body to body instantly, which, I’m sure you’ll understand, makes it pretty tricky for a regular Philadelphia police detective to catch him. Mixing the supernatural with a police procedural is often risky, but the payoff can be incredible – and in this case, the payoff is good enough to make Fallen a solid five-star three-star movie.

Once again, this movie could have been fantastic but could also have turned into unwatchable schlock. Thankfully, Washington is surrounded by a great cast, including John Goodman, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. The director is Gregory Hoblit, who, only two years previously, made Primal Fear. Is it hokum? Yes. Would I gladly watch it this weekend if given the chance? Definitely.

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